The new AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty exam is now available, and its launch is certainly timely, as demand for skills in this area continues to grow at a rapid rate.

AWS continually reflects key technology developments in its qualifications, and artificial intelligence (AI) is proving to be the most significant technological advancement across all industries in recent decades. Within this, the machine learning (ML) sector has exploded, helping companies with everything from improving customer retention rates to driving enhanced insights from big data.

The new AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty certification has an impressive background, as it’s based on the company’s own on-demand ML courses, hands-on labs and documentation originally developed for internal use (Amazon relies on machine learning to improve customer experiences in key areas of its business including product recommendations, substitute product prediction, fraud detection, meta-data validation and knowledge acquisition).

Who is the new qualification aimed at? Essentially, it’s intended for individuals who perform a development or data science role, since it focuses on the ability to design, implement, deploy and maintain machine learning solutions for given business problems.

In addition, it validates the ability to select and justify the appropriate ML approach for a given business problem, identify appropriate AWS services to implement ML solutions, and design and implement scalable, cost-optimised, reliable and secure ML solutions.

AWS recommends one or more years of hands-on experience using ML and artificial intelligence (AI) services, particularly Amazon SageMaker, and other services such as Amazon EMR, AWS Lambda, AWS Glue and Amazon S3. It is also encouraged, but not required, that candidates hold an Associate-level certification or the Cloud Practitioner certification.

And for successful candidates, there are certainly major opportunities out there, with the value of the machine learning market in Europe expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.5% during 2019-2023.

This will see a corresponding demand for ML skills. For example, AI is projected to create 2.3 million jobs by 2020, according to Gartner, whilst the Indeed’s AI talent report confirms that ML is the most in-demand AI skill. All of which confirms that machine learning will remain an in-demand skill for the foreseeable future.